It was after returning that the first thing that I really understood and enjoyed happened at the Apollo. Up till then I felt rather small and helpless and strange. Here was I, like an ant in a nest, but I felt a fool of an ant—good for nothing but to make mistakes and worry Mr. Blades. The huge whirl and rush of business dazed me. I almost heard the thunder of machinery; but I knew really that all the machinery was going on inside the heads of those thirty-five able and industrious men. I expected that they were working for their wives and children and their old, infirm mothers and so on. It was real grim life. It is true there were a few boys there besides me; but they also were able and industrious, if not brilliant, and they were all doing their part in the great machine. Even the messengers were. They were nearly all old, brave, wounded soldiers. I felt the solemnity. I seemed like a mere insect in a solemn cathedral where a mighty service was going on and everybody was doing their appointed part but me. I had spoiled several large sheets of paper and felt a sort of sick feeling that I was not earning my fifty pounds a year, and should soon be told so. I made a calculation on my blotting-paper to see how much money I ought to earn each day. The amount discouraged me and, besides that, I had another sort of animal feeling that I wasn’t getting enough air to breathe. Then, in this dark and despairing moment, there happened a thing that bucked me up and put new life into me. Suddenly I got a terrific smack on the side of the face, and an orange, about half sucked, fell from my cheek upon the page spread before me. It was like a pleasant breath of Merivale. I understood it; I knew how to handle it. For a moment I no longer felt like an insect in some vast cathedral. I was deeply interested and hoped that the man who could do a thing of this sort in a solemn scene like the Country Department of the Apollo Fire Office, might be a real friend to me. It happened that, as I came back from lunching, I had seen a young man with the lid of his desk raised. His head was inside and he was sucking this identical orange that had now hit me in the face. I felt at the time that the man who could suck an orange in the midst of this booming hive of industry must be out of the common. And so he proved to be. He was dark and clean-shaved, with broad shoulders and a purple chin. I knew, therefore, when the orange arrived, who had chucked it, and could not help feeling the purple-chinned young man was a jolly good shot, whatever else he might be. I laughed when the orange hit me, and looked over to him; but he was writing very busily and not a muscle moved. I didn’t dare chuck the half-sucked orange back, for fear of making a boss shot, the consequences of which might have been very serious, because at least three men of considerable age, and one grey, sat between us. So I picked up the orange and got off my stool.